James Lileks Quotes & Sayings

Modern death is a matter of bright rooms and hard machines. Live long enough, and you might be filed away in a nursing home, your history scoured away, your life winnowed down to a few items on the table and some pictures of people who don't come around enough. When you are about to pass on, there is no quiet to attend you: busy fuss and professional zeal strive to bring you back, nail you to the soft cross of the rented bed. — James Lileks

The (campaign) ads all have the same tone - the voice is hushed and amazed when talking about The Enemy, as if you should worry how this amoral, power-mad, extremist puppy-strangler clawed his way out of hell and landed in your district. And the voice is happy and relieved when talking about The Most Noble Candidate, as though he's Santa, Will Rogers and Lincoln all rolled into one. — James Lileks

If you think the '80s were dumber than the '70s, either you weren't there or you weren't paying attention. — James Lileks

Contempt for the things people choose of their own free will is, at its heart, contempt for free will. — James Lileks

The International Criminal Court, like most international institutions, is a wonderful idea. A noble idea. All it needs to work is planetary government, worldwide democracy and the triumph of reason over tribal loyalties, political doctrines and individual ambition. In other words, it requires that we all live in the world described by the "Star Trek" television shows. — James Lileks

When your opponent sets up a straw man, set it on fire and kick the cinders around the stage. Don't worry about losing the Strawperson- American community vote. — James Lileks

Look. Folks. It's simple. If you have poor taste in decorating, don't go nuts in the entryway. Wait until your guests are inside before you spring something unusual on them. — James Lileks

I don't believe in the very concept of "first thing in the morning." I'm a "third thing in the afternoon" fellow. — James Lileks

There are three stages to a man's life. 1. He laughs at Clark Griswold. 2. He sympathizes deeply with Clark Griswold. 3. He laughs at Clark Griswold. — James Lileks

This dissent isn't going to suppress itself. — James Lileks

You can imagine what the advisers are telling Junior Assad: Your statues are much stronger than Saddam's. His were hollow, and bolted in place with inferior metal; yours are solid, and are anchored to a depth of three feet. Let the American tanks come! Their gears will strip and their engines whine in defeat as they attempt to pull down your statues! — James Lileks

She was moving slowly, appearing to come no closer. Perhaps she was losing ground against the earth's rotation. — James Lileks

The popular Arab imagination is a pliant and inventive thing; it can explain any defeat. It is a compass that always points toward the Jew. — James Lileks

Yay Condi Rice. I want her to go to Saudi Arabia, and I want her first words upon getting off the plane to be 'I'll drive.' — James Lileks

If you can pick the baby up without him squirting our of your hands like a bar of soap in the shower, he's not oiled up enough. — James Lileks

I'll start drinking tea over coffee when the big hand is on Never and the little hand is on Ain't Gonna Happen. — James Lileks

I want to believe in intelligent design, and hence I am suspicious of anything that seems to confirm my desire to believe. — James Lileks

Look. Every partisan in every party has to learn one thing: Sometimes your people are wrong. To paraphrase an old retort, saying "My party, right or wrong" is like saying "My Kennedy, drunk or sober." Credibility is earned, and standing up and saying "Fie!" now and then reinforces your truthfulness. — James Lileks

So now we're after a constitutional amendment that defines marriage as a guy-and-gal thing. To the founders, this would have been like an amendment requiring the sun to rise in the east; it would fall under the category of obvious truths that the Constitution need not address. — James Lileks

When liberal celebs stammer out a litany of shopworn bleats about the administration's attempt to turn America into a theocratic prison state, people can't help but notice that these buskers and mummers seem unmoved by the horrors of actual prison states. (Saddam commissioned a copy of the Quran written in his own blood - but John Ashcroft is the real religious nut, don't you know.) — James Lileks

The newspaper is a lecture. The Web is a conversation. — James Lileks

In the early '70s, the nation was afflicted with incurable pattern viruses - small microbes that reproduced and multiplied from a single swatch left on a sofa, and soon covered an entire room. — James Lileks

If Mother had to be told not to shove the entire brick of Ivory up Junior's hindquarters, constipation is the least of his problems. — James Lileks

I love the early hours of the day. It's a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there. — James Lileks

It's always something when you let other people in your world. — James Lileks

It wasn't that I was tired of life, really - just my own. Other people's lives seemed perfectly worthwhile, and only the logistical difficultly of assuming them and the likelihood of being caught kept me from concocting some sort of swap. — James Lileks

I still couldn't imagine that she was really, truly pregnant; maybe this was an hysterical pregnancy. But Sarah was never hysterical. Enthusiastic, yes, ironic on occasion. I couldn't imagine a doctor saying, No, it's just an ironic pregnancy. — James Lileks

She had shins like fireplugs and hips as wide as an oven door. Her head was stuck directly onto her shoulders with the usual Prussian predilection for omitting the neck, and to watch her turn her head in the direction of Aunt Marvel's yodeling demands for attention was to watch a large and noble owl. — James Lileks

The mind forever turns on the lathe of its own contradictions. — James Lileks

She was from the wrong side of the tracks no matter how you gerrymandered the town. — James Lileks

What unnerves so many liberals about talk radio? Simple: It's the unapologetic nature of the conversation, the unwavering sense of certainty. Where's the nuance? The shades of gray? We all know truth is a fragile butterfly dancing in and out of shadow and light, and these guys act as though truth is a rhino charging across a sunlit veldt. — James Lileks

The not-quite-sort-of lie works here too - often an ad will announce that "Congressman Johnson voted for a bill that gave tax breaks to companies like Enron." True - although the bill allowed all companies to accelerate depreciation of copying machines. Yes, Enron benefited, but Enron also benefited from the revolution of the Earth around the sun. Hardly an argument to freeze the planet in one spot. — James Lileks

The al-Qaida cell broken up near Buffalo, N.Y., contains some citizens who also found themselves in Afghanistan, training for the Great All-Around Satan Smiting. Treason? Oh, of course not. They were on a religious pilgrimage and got lost. Happens all the time. I knew a kid who went to Lutheran Bible Camp and turned up six years later in a Christian Identity compound with a shaved head and a Hitler mustache. — James Lileks

So Jane was getting married. Well, more power to her. In fact, let me tighten those straps. Any word from the governor on the pardon? No? All right, then, more power to her. — James Lileks

We always ask where the time went. We never ask where it's coming from. — James Lileks

I'll feel that horrible feeling in my stomach you get when you've gone over to the Dark Side. But I'll be fine. That's the good thing about the Dark Side. Eventually, your eyes adjust. — James Lileks

What's the deal with putting animal feet on tubs? It's like insisting that all pianos should have tails, or dinner tables should have scrotal sacs. One of the things we like about tubs is their immobility, their general disinclination to bolt out of the room, scramble down the stairs, and make for the woods in a blind feral panic. — James Lileks